Doll Quilt Swap 12 (DQS12)

I was so excited to join this swap. What fun! I got a secret partner who a got to internet stalk to figure out her likes and dislikes. Then I got to make her a quilt, knowing all the while that someone was doing the same for me.

My stalkee was Liz from oh sew liz. From my stalking I discerned that she liked pink, circles, scrapiness, and that she had two sons. Having a little man myself, I thought ths she would like something that was solely for her, something pink and girly and wonderful! So that’s what I did.

One of the rules for this round was that you had to use at least one of the following blocks: churn dash/shoofly, log cabin, drunkards path, N.Y. beauty, or flying geese. I decided on the drunkard’s path since I have always been afraid of curves. I thought it would be both a challenge, and yet not too much of a challenge.

I followed the tutorial available on The Sometimes Crafter, but of course, I didn’t EXACTLY follow the tutorial. Toward the bottom of the post she talks about an alternate method for pinning the curves, starting from the center and working out. This, of course, stretches the fabric slightly when you’re sewing. You still get perfectly shaped blocks, but you have to trim off the edge. Somehow when I did this, I lost the little “lip” of straight edge where the blocks meet, so I ended up with 1/4 circles that went all the way to the 1/4 inch seam allowance. Huh. I didn’t think anymore about it until I started sewing the blocks together and they weren’t looking quite how I had planned. What did appear was a big blue heart. How cute is that?

In the tutorial on The Sometimes Crafter, she doesn’t really talk about how to find the center of the curves, so I thought I would take a picture of how I like to do this – after the pieces are cut out, I fold them in half and finger-press right at the edge that is to be sewed. I folded the blue, or concave, piece so that the right side was in and the pink, or convex, piece so that the right side was out, this way I can not only match up the center, but they actually “fit” together.

I quilted the piece all over in pink thread and bound it in blue but didn’t take a picture because sometimes I just get a little excited and forget. Luckily, Liz took a picture when she received it, so here’s her shot:

In return for all of my work, I received this amazing quilt from Anita at Bloomin’ Workshop:

I adore the flying geese, I love that they are super scrappy and the giant ric rac is amazing. Just sayin’.